One Year for Thuggery

I think, dollar for dollar, major junior hockey is pretty well the best bang for the buck when it comes to watching any sport. At one point, back in early '90s, I was able to watch the Blazers. They went to the Memorial Cup three times in four years, taking it home as champions for two of those three years. Teams are cyclic, and the Blazers then are not the Blazers now.

Back then, they were great. After all, they had the likes of Iginla (Flames), Mason (Blues), Baumgartner and Lukowich (Canucks), Strudwick (Oilers) and others that slip my mind. Many from that era have played on various teams throughout the NHL. Granted, not all turned out to be all-stars, but at least they made it to the big league. There is even a Bow Island connection, a player that I watched called Krooshoop.

The passion and energy is unmatched, in my modest opinion, by anything at a higher level, be it the AHL or even the NHL. Obviously, when you get to the big dance, the stakes are higher and the game is greater, but I still maintain that there is more entertainment value in a game in Lethbridge or Medicine Hat or Prince Albert. (One significant proviso is that the teams have to be fairly skilled and competitive, not always the case in, say, Lethbridge.)

Sometimes that intensity takes a really ugly turn, as it did a couple of weeks ago in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL). You may or may not recall the news bulletin (competing with all the bad news out of Haiti, it may have been hard). Let me re-cap it for you:

Patrice Cormier, a centre for the Rouyn-Noranda Huskies, nailed Mikael Tam, a defensemen for the Quebec Remparts with an elbow to the face on Sunday, January 17. It was a direct shot, with Cormier actually leaving the bench to make a beeline for Tam. Cormier, better known as the captain the Canadian junior team that lost recently the American juniors, will now be known as the goon who left another player writhing and convulsing on the ice.

A hundred yards in any direction outside that rink and he would have been arrested for assault and battery, at the least. However, inside the rink, it's considered part of the game. Or at least it has been until this incident. Good, clean checks that result in injury are what we call part of the game – an unfortunate part of the game, no less. Vicious goonery such as what we saw even has Don Cherry, hockey's loudest proponent of thuggery, shaking his head.

Major junior hockey is exciting, but there no place for violence. Breathtaking, perhaps, but that should be on the part of the willing fan – not an unwilling player, gasping for breath. I agree with the QMJHL's verdict, as if anyone with any clout really cares, that the kid is banned for the rest of the year from playing hockey. Perhaps he should be banned for the first year or two of his professional career (Cormier is a draft pick of the Devils), which would keep him out of New Jersey for a few years.

However, as wicked as that shot was, we as a culture, of course, have duped ourselves into a "that" and "this" dichotomy. For example, when we endorse UFC, when we buy or sell barbarian DVDs, when we watch movies that are rated "R" for severe violence, I suggest we live by a double-standard. Let's be reasonable here: like hockey, some violence is part of life; I'm talking about the really sadistic type.

In other words, "that" is hockey, but "this" is my private world and is no one else's business, and I can do whatever I want.

While I don't condone Cormier's senseless, moronic hit, I suggest to you that he is actually a reflection of at least a segment of our goofy society at large. Not every one, of course: just the twits that watch the same stuff in a permissible environment. I suggest the following: Don't stop at Cormier; go after the sponsors, buyers and sellers of the blood and gore movies and DVDs, even the parents who turn a blind eye to the really serious stuff.

Maybe we should give them all one year in the penalty box.